Balancing Motherhood With Your Beauty Business

The beauty industry has become more flexible than ever. Beauty professionals can start home-based businesses, create their own hours, and chase their goals at their own pace. This makes it the perfect opportunity for those seeking flexibility and a stable income. Now more women, including mothers with young children, are given a chance to take ownership and become entrepreneurs.

Motherhood is both challenging and rewarding at the same time. It comes with many overwhelming pressures, especially for first-time mothers. Suddenly the focus isn’t on you anymore–it’s on your child. There is the term, motherhood penalty, which refers to the adverse impact on the earnings of women who give birth and bring up children. Many women lose out on career growth or make the sacrifice of quitting their full-time jobs to focus on motherhood.

As a woman, you shouldn’t have to choose between your career goals or family. The beauty industry is flourishing and opens up many opportunities for female entrepreneurs to excel. Many of these include mothers! In the United States, there are over 12.3 million women-owned businesses that generate $1.8 trillion a year. You can have both without tossing either one in the backburner.

Balancing motherhood and your beauty business will be challenging, however the rewards will outweigh the risks if you’re willing to put in the work. Author, Lauren Smith Brody, calls the working mom stage the “fifth trimester”. You have the three trimesters of pregnancy, the fourth is the newborn phase, then the fifth. This is a great book to read as it tackles every personal and professional detail of working motherhood.

Meet Mandie Garmon, a Lash Artist, owner of Mindful Lash + Beauty, wife, and mother of three beautiful young children. Her journey in the beauty industry started after she had her second child. Her son was around 6 months old when she decided to not return to her job at an elementary school. She loved her job, though she wanted to make a shift to something that was more flexible and allowed her to spend more time with her children. “It’s really hard to go back to work knowing you are missing out on time with your baby,” she says. “It’s even harder when you know you have to leave two kids at home.” That’s when she decided to go to school for aesthetics.

“I had always been interested in skincare and thought that if I was able to grow and build my own business, then I would have the ultimate power in creating a schedule that works for me,” says Mandie. “I went through my program at Oliver Finley in Boise and stumbled upon a lash technician job. I honestly hated lashes while I was in school–I chucked my tweezers kind of hate. However, I knew that it was an opportunity to gain some work experience in the beauty industry. I ended up falling in love with lashes after I got better training and my clientele grew as my skills improved.”

Find Your Support System

Having a strong support system will make everything a better experience. Navigating motherhood or entrepreneurship on its own can be difficult. When you put the two together, you will stumble across more challenges as you try to juggle both. However, when you have help from other people, it will help you a lot.

Having people by your side will help you greatly from a mental aspect. As a business owner, the fear of failure or not being good enough seems to be common thoughts. This tends to happen when they start comparing themselves to the competition. We always recommend beauty professionals to find a network of artists and technicians to connect with. Instead of competing with other lash artists, you can turn it into a learning and networking opportunity.

Looking from the motherhood perspective, it’s normal to seek help through friends and family. Having a strong support system will help you with the transition and ongoing challenges experienced day to day. If you could find someone to help you share or ease off the parenthood responsibilities, that’d be great. If not, there are many resources out there available to help you.

For Mandie, her husband is a correctional officer and has a little more of a rigid schedule. They decided to work together and take turns looking after the children. Instead of having to hire a nanny, they decided she would work when he was home so that they were the ones raising the kids. This method worked out very well for their family.

“He is gone to work a lot, so I do have to consolidate clients to a few days and I have really tried to hone in on capitalizing on my #naptimehustle. A lot of my behind the scene work is done at home during nap time, early in the morning, and late in the evenings,” Mandie says. “Although it does slow the speed of my professional growth a bit, I love it because I have so much time with the kids. We now have 3 children and I don’t feel like I miss out on any time with the baby. I get to really experience her growing up with very little sacrifice.”

Allocate Your Time

As a beauty business owner, there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes. A large chunk of your business is what happens outside of servicing your clients. This includes marketing, preparing social media content, and administrative work. It can be difficult to avoid crossing over between time for your business and your children. To help with this, you should allocate your time wisely.

Mandie tries to not zone in on the hustle too much to the point she misses out on her mom time. If the kids are up and playing, she will spend time with her kids instead of trying to work.

“I try to be present with them because if I did try to work during that time, I would most likely get frustrated if they are seeking attention. Whether they want a snack or to play a game, I wouldn’t actually make progress,” she says. “Mom time is mom time and work time is work time… However, I do let the kids know that there are times when I need to work during mom time. I set timers and work for that uninterrupted 20 minutes because they know the drill, and then I go back to focusing on them.

Keeping those short-focused time blocks allow me to bust work out faster and better than when I try to wear the mom hat and lash boss hat at the same time.

Optimize Your Business

When you have a lot on your plate, you will need great time management skills and learn to optimize your business to ensure it is running operationally efficiently. Using affordable business software will help streamline your business right from the start. This will leave you more time for growing your business on top of motherhood.

Using a software such as Jupiter will simplify your business and reduce your administrative work. Everything from booking clients, collecting appointments to sending forms or pre- and post-care instructions, it’s done for you. You’ll have a lot more time on your hands to spend on what you love.

Jupiter will work with your unique schedule to protect time with your family. If you ever need to block off time for your children, you can do so on your calendar. Jupiter will automatically work around your availability so clients will only book when you’re free.

Create a Set Routine

Mandie’s biggest tip to mothers in the beauty industry is to create a system and schedules for yourself. One thing she does to balance work with mom life is meal planning. “I don’t mean this like the healthy, fitness type of meal planning, but simply in planning a menu for the week. In the beginning, we had many pizza nights because I would have an evening client, then rush home and be too exhausted to plan or think of something for dinner–my husband isn’t the best at planning dinners beyond mac and cheese,” she says.

“Now I look at my appointments for the week and plan dinners that fit with any activities the kids have and my appointments. If it’s a late busy evening, I plan something quick,” says Mandie. “If I am getting off work on time to pick up my kids from school, I can make something a little more elaborate.”

This goes hand in hand with allocating her time wisely. As mentioned earlier, Mandie will try to work during nap times, early in the mornings, or later in the evening. Staying on a set routine allows her to better balance motherhood and her beauty business.

Balancing motherhood and a beauty business may not ever get easier, however you will get better at it. It will be difficult at first when you introduce and integrate a new stage of your life with your current. Over time you will find what works best for your family and business. As your business grows, your children will too.

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Mandie will continue to inspire many mothers and beauty business owners out there! To learn more about her business, you can check out her website and Instagram page.

If you are a beauty professional and would like to be featured in future blog posts, let’s connect!